The agency wants to broaden the base of small businesses awarded contracts, subcontracts. The General Services Administration has started its mentor-protégé program to include more small businesses in GSA contracts, the agency announced today.

Officials want to urge companies to help small businesses in establishing themselves in the federal marketplace and then foster long-term relationships between small and large companies, which often are prime contract-holders, according to a Federal Register notice.

The program includes contracts awarded under GSA’s Multiple Award Schedules program, the notice states.

The program will allow small businesses to become protégés and receive help in their development as federal contractors from large-business mentors. Mentor companies can offer business guidance and share with their protégés lessons they’ve learned along the way. GSA also will allow small businesses that want to mentor other small businesses, the notice states.

A mentor is an established company offering to help small-business subcontractors in being more successful.

GSA expects the program to increase the overall number of small businesses receiving GSA contracts and subcontracts. However, GSA won’t measure the program's success on the basis of awards and dollars alone. Officials plan to consider success as an increase in the number and value of subcontracts awarded to protégé companies by mentors. They also want to see expanded expertise by the protégé firms by seeing them enter industries that have they’ve not traditionally worked in, the notice states.

To encourage companies to be mentors, the program allows contracting officers to look more favorably at bids from mentor/protégés, and they can consider prime contractors' compliance with its subcontracting plans as a factor in evaluating the company’s past performance, the notice states. Read More http://tr.im/wBF7
 

The General Services Administration is looking for Internet-based IT services to offer federal agencies through a proposed cloud-computing storefront service. Last month, the agency issued a Request for Quotation for providing cloud services to government agencies.

The document describes a GSA-run storefront portal in which government agencies can purchase commercially offered infrastructure IT services using a credit card or other approved payment option. Specifically, the GSA is looking for three broad categories of services to offer through this portal: Storage services, virtual machines and Web hosting.

To serve the government, service providers will need to have the following in place:

* The ability for customers to procure and provide service without vendor review.
* Two separate facilities within the continental United States that offer the service. Internet bandwidth for each location should be no less than 1 Gigabit per second.
* Virtually unlimited storage.
* The ability for the customer to scale up or down service on an as-needed basis.
* A dashboard for each customer to convey usage, as measured on a weekly basis.

Each service will be accessible remotely by dual-factor authentication. Trouble tickets should be able to be submitted by application programming interface (API), and all services should be maintained at 99.95 percent uptime. For outages lasting longer than one hour a month, the provider must provide a written description of the cause of the outage.

Federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra has stated that GSA is planning to set up a cloud-computing "storefront," that federal agencies can use to procure IT services.

For the RFQ, GSA adopted the definitions of cloud computing that were authored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read full article...Washington Technology  tr.im/vJFA